From ethics to ethics: combatting dangers to democracy

ABSTRACT

This article posits an interpersonal ethical commitment to combat dangers to democracy in current times. Largely within an American context, two complementary pillars of ethics are presented. The first is from Nel Noddings and the ethics of care and the second developed primarily from Richard Rorty in a neo-pragmatist view. The contexts of present dangers, worldwide, especially in the USA, and then of this nation’s schooling, situate the ethics. A suggestion for teachers, students, and their schools as ‘citizen educators’ to be active in their communities offers one road forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Noddings
• Rorty
• Shklar
• Dewey
• democracy
• danger

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This essay is developed from my lecture, Aims of Education: From Care to Crisis in Democracy. It was the Ilan Gur-Ze’ev Memorial Lecture delivered at an event honoring Nel Noddings with an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa at the meeting of INPE, the International Network of Philosophers of Education, in August 2018. An acknowledgment closes these notes.

2. Herein ethics and morality are used interchangeable although I have a sense that ethics is more personal and morality a larger societal view.

3. Although I take a different approach at times and present a current situation, Edward McClellan’s brief history is useful. See Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present, published in 1999.

4. Noddings is a renowned philosopher and philosopher of education who continues writing at almost ninety. Among her accomplishments is president of the National Academy of Education. Her numerous works are translated worldwide including throughout Europe and as a series of classics in Chinese. Full disclosure, I have been associated closely with her for over 30 years.

5. Noddings’s philosophy has its own unique character. In down-to-earth language, in addition to the discipline, she employs many sources from literature and history and a lifetime in education.

6. In American law, an interesting ‘omission’ is that there is no responsibility to assist strangers in times of imminent danger.

7. Given unique approaches, a tradition of pragmatism rather than a systemic body of thought seems more appropriate. This, incidentally, holds for a post-structuralist tradition too.

8. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity that Rorty published in 1989, a conception of language was developed as vocabularies, ‘the invention of new tools to take the place of old tools’ (Rorty 1989, 12). He asserts that these are developed by great thinkers like Galileo, Hegel, and Yeats. The cultural change also brings new everyday vocabularies. Rorty died in 2007.

9. As a political theorist, Shklar shares with Noddings a use of common terms, various literary sources along with philosophers, and a text largely for an American audience. Her ‘main man’ is Montaigne. Shklar died in 1992.

10. An extensive literature has recently emerged on worldwide and American themes. Three sources are Cass Sunstein’s edited collection Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (2018); Yasha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (2018); and James Campbell, Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (2018, 2016). The multiple author themes together in a comparative study of ‘fallen’ democracies’ from Europe and Latin America with the USA is Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018).

11. The origin of the project is the report of France’s Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, on unique features of US democracy in his travels of the mid-1830s.

12. See Nel Noddings and Laurie Brooks, Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom, published in 2017.

13. I believe this idea can benefit from the study of previous democratic practices in schools and communities and in research efforts. The idea, however, is not to scale up but to keep democracy effective in its small organization and ethics-based politics. Given American diversity, these efforts can help overcome polarization even at the level of younger students. The latter appeared the day after the 2016 election; see a YouTube video of Michigan Middle Schoolers that was broadcast on CNN.

14. Thanks to Hanan Alexander and Joris Vlieghe, to INPE colleagues, to Irith Freedman for invitation and wonderful support, and to Danny Gibboney for thoughtful assistance. Thanks to Nel Noddings for continued conversation on educational aims we share.